500 words a day on whatever I want

The Birth of a Nation

“The Birth of a Nation” (1915) is a Hollywood film based on the bestselling book, “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan” (1905) by Thomas Dixon, Jr. It was the most successful silent film ever. It revolutionized film-making and led to the rebirth of the Klan.

Lilian Gish stars as a Pure White Woman saved by the Klan from a large mulatto who lusts after her.

D.W. Griffith directs as a film-making genius who has no idea that he is a racist.

The film burst upon a world of nickelodeons where for five cents ($0.05) you could watch short films, generally 10 to 15 minutes long, which were little more than stage plays acted in front of unmoving cameras.

“The Birth of a Nation” was over three hours long and cost an unheard of $2.00 (3.7 crowns) to see. Even if you account for its greater length, it was still three times more expensive.

It had:

A new style of filming: cross-cuts, close-ups, establishing shots, flashbacks and a camera that moved! It had chase scenes and battle scenes.

The full range of Black experience according to White people: Coons, Mammies, Uncle Toms, Black Brutes, Black Bucks and Tragic Mulattoes. It was the first film to show Black men as uncontrollably violent and dark-skinned Black women as fat, middle-aged and desexed. (The main Black characters were played by Whites in blackface.)

Most of this later became commonplace in Hollywood films.

The film shows the American Civil War, Reconstruction and the rise of the Klan through the eyes of two White families, one from the North, the other from the South.

The film takes President Woodrow Wilson’s view of Reconstruction as:

“a veritable overthrow of civilization … the white South under the heel of the black South … The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.”

The film ends with the Klan restoring White rule with the blessing of White Jesus.

President Wilson, at the White House premiere, reportedly gave the film a standing ovation and said:

“It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true.”

W.E.B. Du Bois said the film misrepresented Black men:

“either as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician or a faithful but doddering idiot.”

Jane Addams, in March 1915 when it opened in New York, said its picture of the Klan as noble was as misleading as its picture of Black men as “brutal and vicious”. She warned:

“As an appeal to race prejudice, it is full of danger.”

She was right: it led to riots, violence and the rebirth of the Klan, which in turn led to White Protestantist terrorism against Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics, socialists and communists. Klan cross burning comes from this film.

The NAACP called the film racist propaganda and led protests against it. Griffith, the director, defended it as free speech and quoted Wilson. In time it was banned in five states and 19 cities, but the Klan and the Museum of Modern Art continued to show it regularly.

They talked about this movie in film school all the time because of the revolutionary cinematic techniques and I had to watch it. Or I tried to watch it, but it gets to the part with the White actors in blackface and I gotta go. It’s so grotesque. I’ve written about it often, but don’t tell anybody I haven’t really watched it. I can’t. I can’t take it. It’s too gross.

Just try, just go ahead and try to sit through three hours of that sh#t. It’s unbearable, like being in a room sewer gasses have backed up into.

“Rofl! I was going to try for the sake of having more to say, but you comment really lightened my day.”

Oh, you lightened mine. I was rolling on the floor laughing as I wrote that, but I didn’t think anybody’d be seeing the same humor. Some things all you can do is laugh.

Actually, it might be a good party. See who can stay in the room the longest. I’m kind of picturing a party in the seventies with joints passing around, Then that bizarre looking white woman in dark paint starts scheming to get in bed with that funky old White man so she can be some kind of kept woman. You can’t imagine how nasty this woman is. Then toke a little more and get in a good belly laugh.

When Abraham Lincoln said “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he didn’t mean the United States of America, but instead was referring to the same “civilization” that Woodrow Wilson talked about: white America. According to these two men, blacks are not truly part of America.

March being white history month, a few nice words about white people are in order. I want to thank a number of white people who have made me a better educated person on a number of issues. I won’t list their names since that list would be too long.

Is this where the stereotype of black men as lust-mad rapists started from? Save the virtuous white women from them?

I don’t think it started there, that was part of the reason given for the institution of the Klan — to protect White women. “Gone with the Wind” dramatizes the concept, when Scarlet goes by herself to the mill and gets stopped by ruffians and Big Sam saves her. Of course, that was written after “Birth of a Nation” but I have no reason to doubt it was dramatizing what people had in their heads during reconstruction.

“In time it was banned in five states and 19 cities, but the Klan and the Museum of Modern Art continued to show it regularly.”

As does C-SPAN! They showed this sh*t on C-SPAN here in SC during “Black History Month” (we get the shortest month of the year and they just HAD to make sure and remind us of “our place” as THEY celebrate this “cinematic blockbuster.” SMMFH). At first I couldn’t believe it, then, I slapped myself saying, “Why are you surprised?!”

I intended to write about it but, it sits in draft mode still (as have a lot of posts bouncing around in my head over the last almost year) — so many thanks Abagond for your 500 words or less!

Is this where the stereotype of black men as lust-mad rapists started from? Save the virtuous white women from them?

Linda Keres Carter said:

I don’t think it started there, that was part of the reason given for the institution of the Klan — to protect White women… what people had in their heads during reconstruction.

Very interesting… Now that I think about it, the stereotype of black men as rapists of white women does indeed trace its origins to Reconstruction. For centuries, white men had raped black female slaves but now that black men were no longer in chains, they were free to “retaliate” by raping white women in return. This seems to be a classic case of white guilt causing whites to project their own crimes onto blacks.

It would also explain the black-white interracial disparity we see today. Black male/white female relationships are more common than black female/white male relationships due in part to the historical stigma attached to black men lusting after white women (in white people’s minds), like a forbidden fruit fantasy brought to life.

You should be talking about the letter sent to Iran by the Republican Senators.

You can shoot it over to the Open Thread if you want to discuss it.

In the meantime, I think that burying this masterpiece of white supremacy in a quiet corner would be a mistake. Instead, it should be held up as an example of depths white America was willing to go to maintain its prestige and power over all others.

Hmm, interesting tidbit re: burning of the cross. I never got the premise behind it. And don’t have a desire to watch this flick. So this movie started the hateful tradition. It seems so odd, to do. I thought the cross was sacred to Christians so burning of a cross to me would seem sacrilegious. As if the KKK had any real rhyme or reason behind their stupidity.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, the operative word of White History Month is, well, history. Birth of a Nation is useful for contextualizing how White Supremacy has acted through media to galvanize it’s footsoldiers and accomplish its goals in the past and present; the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and American Sniper are the modern heirs of Birth of a Nation.

Most thinkers now know that it was an exaggerations and the movie has been condemned for years.

Never presume to know the thoughts and feelings of others. More often than not you’re projecting.

I found “The Birth of a Nation” boring and sickening. It took me four sittings to watch it all. I watched it to the end only for the sake of this post. It is not just the length – it expects you to like things such as the Klan riding to the rescue or Blacks being made into a laughingstock. Seeing Jesus bless the Klan’s overthrow of Reconstruction was not what I would call a happy ending.

I viewed ‘Birth of a Nation’ twice. My question is that I find it hard to believe that some people actually believe that racist garbage. D.W. Griffith had issues big time. This clown’s next film ‘Intolerance’ was anti-Catholic and just as bad as ‘Birth..’

“reading some of the reviews so far, I am not sure if I could stomach watching it. Is it in black and white? That will likely seal it for me.”

Not only is it in B&W, it’s silent. The first real ‘movie’ ever made.

I was thinking about that scene tonight, where I gave out. First you see some perfectly normal looking black extras, looking really bewildered like WTF am I doing here? Then there’s this bizarre White woman wearing shoe polish. Hideous.

But then there are some title cards that reminded me of my great great grandmother-in-law who had a child by the White man she had to work for, who grew up in that twisted household. And then I’m starting to get interested in her. Then there’s another title card and I realize they’re seeing her as this hussy trying to seduce the White man so she can get special favors.

That’s not how we saw it. On our side of the family she was a horribly victimized person. We’re still mad about it.

You’ve no reason to say “most”, or any other vague quantifiers like “few”, “many”, “several”, etc., with nothing to back it up. It smells a bit of “No True Scotsman”. Birth of a Nation has played no small part in the so-called “Lost Cause” narrative of the Confederacy which continues to validate Southern Nationalism and apologetics for racism and slavery. This isn’t some fringe belief, it’s a narrative taught as history throughout the country:

“I viewed ‘Birth of a Nation’ twice. My question is that I find it hard to believe that some people actually believe that racist garbage.”

When an oppressive population is in that collective mindset to concoct their own version of reality that relieves them of moral blame they will seek out any event that will ‘prove’ their case. It’s impossible to subject a population to the kind of ordeal Black people went through living for centuries as chattel without there being someone, somewhere who freaks out and acts out.

And that’s all those concocters of alternative universes living in denial are waiting for. They seize onto it and turn it into an enduring legend that anyone bought into the collective agenda is going to find credible.

It wasn’t DeMille creating a legacy of racism. He was dramatizing what was near and dear in the hearts of an entire population. It was the mythology they had to believe in to persist comfortably in the immoral universe they were actually inhabiting.

Yes, they believe that garbage and they cling to it like a security blanket. Makes their world go around. Literally.

The silent part sealed the deal. I just can’t. I also don’t want them to get royalties from me watching that shyte. Though I have started to enough a Daiquiri or two over the weekend, so that may dull the pain.

This quotation first appears (without attribution) in all known sources and literature in Milton MacKaye, “The Birth of a Nation,” Scribner’s Magazine, CII (Nov. 1937), 69. Dixon did not use the quotation in his memoirs, “Southern Horizons” (composition date unknown).

Marjorie Brown King, the only survivor among the persons at the showing in the East Room, told the Editor [Link] on June 23, 1977, that Wilson seemed lost in thought during the showing, and that he walked out of the room without saying a word when the movie was over.